Gun violence has a long tail.
Michelle Kerr-Spry knows this well. She is a gun violence survivor and a community activist with Mothers in Charge through which she supports women in Philadelphia who’ve lost someone to a shooting.
It didn’t surprise her when one day last December a woman came in seeking solace from a killing that took place three years ago, when the world seemed upside down from the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests around the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, when there was a general sense that society was coming unraveled.
Grief deferred is common, Kerr-Spry said.
“The circumstance is the homicide,” she said, “but the lifelong work is how do you try to recover and heal from that traumatic event — and that is a forever thing.”
Many of the women Kerr-Spry advises are among a group of tens of thousands of people whose lives were altered forever by the surge in gun violence that began during the pandemic. Though gun violence has returned to its normal (unacceptably high) levels in many places, the long tail of it, the shock and grief of it, will be felt for years to come.
In an effort to understand the scope of what was lost, The Trace analyzed over 220,000 shootings from the Gun Violence Archive. The shootings occurred between 2020, when the surge began, and 2024, when many places saw gun violence return to the pre-pandemic levels of 2019.
Approximately 18,126 more people died than would have if gun violence had remained at its 2019 level, according to our analysis.
About 27 percent of those killings — more than one in four — took place in majority African American neighborhoods in large cities, though such areas represent just 7 percent of all neighborhoods.
In other words, the burden of the unprecedented increases in homicides landed hardest on the very places that were already struggling with a disproportionate share of shootings and deaths.
During the surge, The Trace found, shooting deaths increased in nearly every type of neighborhood, including remote rural areas and leafy suburbs, across all races and ethnicities. But the lion’s share of deaths were found in large cities. Though African American neighborhoods experienced the most disproportionate share of deaths, both Hispanic neighborhoods and neighborhoods where people of color combined are the majority also experienced more than their share.
By contrast, 42 percent of all neighborhoods are majority white and in cities, but just 26 percent of excess deaths took place there.
George Mohler, chairperson of the computer science department at Boston College, uses statistical and deep learning methods to study how crime is influenced by location and time. When the maelstrom of 2020 struck, he and his colleagues wanted to know how such an external shock would affect existing inequalities of safety.
“It’s a well-known observation that crime concentrates [within] American cities,” Mohler said. “There is a significant inequality in terms of risk of being a victim of gun violence,” even for people who live in the same city.
People tend to think in terms of safe or violent neighborhoods, but these hotspots are much more specific locations, like a single intersection or a handful of blocks. And they tend to coincide with other forms of what researchers call concentrated disadvantage. People in the same areas are more likely to be deprived of health care, receive less or lesser quality education, and suffer from unemployment and poverty.
In 2022, Mohler and his co-authors published a study showing that during the first two years of the surge in Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles, the increased gun violence was concentrated in groups of blocks where shootings had already been unusually prevalent.
In Philadelphia, 36 percent of the increase was in such areas. In New York and Los Angeles, about half of the increase occurred in the 10 percent of census block groups that had the most gun violence before the pandemic.
“Gun violence didn’t just move to new areas,” he said, the historic increase was “concentrated in the areas that had a history over the last several decades.”
In many ways, it makes sense that people living in areas of concentrated disadvantage would be most vulnerable to the social disruptions of the pandemic and the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, said James Densley, a criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota and co-founder of The Violence Prevention Project.
“These were lives that were precariously dangling by a thread and then the pandemic and murder of George Floyd came along and cut the thread,” he said.
For a recently published study, Densley and his co-author interviewed 18 people in Minnesota who were convicted of homicide for killing someone during the pandemic. The researchers didn’t have unrealistic expectations, he said, but “I don’t think we were quite prepared for how tragic these lives were.”
The people they met had difficult childhoods in which they were exposed to drugs and violence. Many of them had spent their lives bouncing between homelessness and being tenuously housed. One man had discovered his murdered stepfather as a teenager, describing the scene as being like a horror film.
The features of their lives were often very basic — the daily routine of school, a loved one, a homeless shelter, a job, psychiatric medication.
“Sometimes the smallest and simplest things were keeping people alive and keeping them on track,” Densely said. “Yes, they were dangling by a thread, but the thread was just about hanging on.”
Then, for many, the pandemic stripped those things away.
One interviewee became homeless after his shelter closed because of COVID-19. His mental health deteriorated, and the chaos of the protests after George Floyd’s murder gave him a pervasive sense of threat. Then one night he got into an altercation near his homeless encampment. Thinking “I have to protect myself no matter what,” he shot the man.
Another young man felt empty and lost after his school went virtual, and because of the increasing despair about the violence around him. Eventually, he and some people he knew got to chatting on social media about robbing a drug dealer. But during the robbery, the dealer was shot and killed.
The circumstance is the homicide, but the lifelong work is how do you try to recover and heal from that traumatic event – and that is a forever thing.
Michelle Kerr-Spry, community activist with Mothers in Charge
The study also emphasized the ways that once violence surges, it begets more violence.
“It’s the most vulnerable communities that are the most impacted, and they also don’t necessarily have the resources to thrive after this,” Densely said.
One interviewee felt that society was unraveling, especially after he saw a nearby Target store looted. He started carrying a gun in public. A local crime-monitoring app constantly brought crimes like shootings and carjackings to his attention. “I didn’t feel safe,” he told the researchers, describing the volatile summer of 2020 as “World War III.”
One morning, he got in an altercation with the father of his girlfriend’s children, whom he said was in a gang, and shot him dead. It was the first time he had ever fired a gun at someone.
The violence “created a perception that everyone was living in a sort of arms race,” Densley said. People thought, “if everyone’s carrying a weapon, I’m going to carry a weapon.”
Densley said that if there’s any hope in all of this, it may be that surprisingly simple things can help people hold it together, including school and community-based organizations.
“The threadbare safety net that was just about doing its job four to five years ago is just about doing its job now.”
The long tail of activist Kerr-Spry’s grief is not over.
Her brother was her biggest cheerleader, and in her eyes “the sun rose and set on his shoulders,” she said.
But after he was shot and killed in Philadelphia in 2003, there was no time to grieve. She had to care for her younger sister and her parents, who were so devastated they struggled to get out of bed. There was also the matter of who would care for her brother’s four children.
“I couldn’t grieve him because there was work to do to support my family,” Kerr-Spry said.
Two years later, just when she felt she might finally have a bit of space to process her own feelings, her son, Blain Spry, was shot to death. This time, her husband fell apart, and she invested her energy in helping him through.
“It was almost three years before I was brave enough to tap into what I had experienced,” she said. “I was so afraid to lean into this. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to come back.”
Now, counseling others, she often feels her own grief well up again.
“You’re tapping into your own loss every single day,” she said. “I would be telling a lie if I said you can compartmentalize.”
The fear for Mothers in Charge, and many community groups that fight gun violence, is that declining shooting rates will prompt the world to conclude that gun violence is over in their communities.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has already informed Mothers in Charge that its funding will decrease.
That is troubling for Kerr-Spry because she knows the need for healing is great, especially in the wake of the pandemic’s surge of gun violence.
“We have just now started to tap into a traumatized community that is getting more comfortable with turning to supporting services,” she said.
“If these services were to go away, then when people are ready, they might not be available.”
The data used in this story was assembled through a thorough analysis. Read our methodology here.
